Monday, July 30, 2012

Brooklyn commenters reacted with shock and revulsion to writer Amy Sohn's frightening depiction in The Awl of married life in Park Slope and environs, where moms are drunken sluts, dads are stoned and "Ninety percent of the sex being had in brownstone Brooklyn is by French ex-pats."

In The 40-Year-Old Reversion, Sohn says the characters in her new novel, Motherland, "are inspired by my neighbors, who seek liberation not through consciousness-raising and EST the way their mothers did, but through Fifty Shades of Grey and body shots."

Apparently, Park Slope parents do blow and flash each other. They feel old and think about divorce. Taking care of their children bores them, but they get smashed and forget to use contraception and that's why New York has a baby boom right now.

"It’s the moment when a mom dresses as a Harajuku girl for Halloween, or there’s a full bar at a four-year-old's birthday party, or two ladies step out of book group to smoke on the stoop. It’s blowjob gestures at cocktail parties followed by a-little-too hysterical laughter. It’s the mother who says, 'Mommy needs an Advil because she stayed up too late last night.' It’s fortieth birthday parties at karaoke bars."

There are more than 400 reader comments. Typical is, "All your friends are assholes." This piece apparently convinced at least one reader to move to the suburbs and another to turn gay. One said she felt like picking up a blade and stabbing herself multiple times.

It also inspired creatively bizarre responses such as, "Imagining the people in this post doing it reminds me of Liquid Sky, where the aliens hover around in their tiny flying saucer sucking the life out of anybody who has an orgasm, and this one totally anhedonic but slutty person thinks she's killing all her sex partners by doing sex with them. If they remade that with zombies, that would be this."